Bubulle's weblog

Mon, 22 Mar 2010

I'm now on my way back from The first miniDebCamp and miniDebconf that
happened from March 13th to March 19th in Khon Kaen, Thailand.

This even was organized locally by a team of very motivated Thai
Debian enthusiasts and contributors, such as Theppitak Karoonboonyanan
(*the* Thai DD), Neutron Soutmun, Kitt Tientanopajai, and all those whose name I'm
not remembering as of now (I hope they won't mind).

The even had kinda the structure of DebConfs, with a few days of "Debcamp"
to begin. See the full
schedule.

We were hosted in Khon Kaen University (KKU), one one the most famous
universities in Thailand, a small "town in town" in a city with a few
hundred thousand inhabitants (dunno exactly). Lodging was done in a
hotel located inside the university. Interestingly, the hotel was also
hosting youg students participating to "Summer Camps" (apparently
training systems to get good school results) gving to all this a very
young atmosphere.

The hacking lab and talks location was a 30-seat room in the
university library, and meals were brought in there very efficiently,
with the very specific way that Thai people have to transport each and
every kind of meal (in small plastic bags closed by rubber).

I arrived only in the 3rd day because I had commitments at home that
made it impossible to me to come for the first day. During these days,
people have been very busy hacking and participating to the Bug
Squashing Party. During that BSP, about 50 bugs have been touched,
without about 15 or so closed.

Other non Thai attendees were Andrew Lee from TW, Paul Wise from AU,
Daiki Ueno and Yukiharu Yabuki from JP. Organizers were expecting some
attendees from neighbouring countries such as Laos, Vietnam or
Cambodia. Unfortunately, none of them could come, including Anousak
Soupavanh, leader of Lao free software localization efforts, who I was
very impatient to meet. Transport difficulties, or visa problems, do
not make things easy in that part of the world.

On Wednesday we had a "DayTrip" as it is common for such event. We
went abotu 50 km away from Khon Kaen, to visit a nice place, close to
a dam lake, and climbed a hill surrounded by a big temple and a giant
Buddha statue. Then we had a wonderful lunch in a fish restaurant in
the very specific Thai way to share stuff: everything is on the table
and you pick your food here and there, at you rconvenience. Of course,
local advice before trying apparently innocent food is always worth it
because the fire might be hidden anywhere (for instance in that soja
plate which I tried and that set my mouth as a burning hell for 20
minutes). The journey ended by a visit of a great temple in Khon Kaen
and, very noticeably by a dinner in a very popular barbecue restaurant
in "all you can eat" style for...100Bath (so, about 2.5 euros). Maybe
only vegetarian people had more trouble enjoying the meal as it was
mostly made of various meat (and sea food).

The talk days were very intense, at least in my opinion. Probably
because I ended up giving four talks, some of them completely
improvised (about IP-over-DNS, which I was using at the hotel and
about which many wanted to learn a little bit more, and GPG keysigning
processes). It turned out that the GPG talk was well received and,
discussing with Paul later on, we agreed that such a talk, mostly
meant to explain the DOs and DON'Ts For good GPG keys signing, could
be a good idea even for Debconfs.

There were also a few talks about local initiatives and efforts to
develop (and not only promote) free software. We have no recordings of
these talks as we were infortunately missing some video recording
installation (maybe next time, Thep) just like the miniConf that was
happening in Panama at about the same time was having.

Due to local regulation on the university network, we had some limitations with
Internet access (some firewalling that for instance was preventing SIP
to work properly, which made a video-conference with a japanese user
group fail, unfurtunately).

The event ended in a round table discussion about ideas to organize
something bigger in the future. The local community in Thailand has
apparently the energy, maybe ressources and local support to be able
to organize a slightly bigger event as first try (somethign like an
Asian DebConf or something similar, targeting mostly Asian
contributors and about 50-100 people. Thailand seems to be a good
target to host such event, with many things being relatively
inexpensive (and not only beer!). And they even think about possibly
hosting a Debconf at some time in the future (actually, Martin Krafft
should also be credited for bringing this idea). That isn't as crazy
as it seems and, provided that potential organizers start involving
themselves in the current Debconfs, everything seems to be possible.

After all, if we look back to 2005, only one person (hello, Safir) was
seriously thinking that Debconf could really happen in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, right?

After this week (followed by 2.5 days of sightseeing in Bangkok for
me, plus a small meeting today with local Thai Linux corporate users
and IT company owners), I feel like the mood in Asia about Debian
development is high and full of potential. The miniconf last year in
Taiwan was already a good success, by establishing a good connection
between people.....we need to keep that alive and, hopefully, there
will be other miniconfs in this part of the world. And, well, if I can
be there, I'll be there.